Apple has announced a new country to gain access to its mobile payments service. Spain is lucky to follow Japan and Switzerland that started supporting Apple Pay this year.

Apple unveiled that Apple Pay debuted for Spanish customers on December 1. Initially, it was reported that the platform will be supported by only one bank, Santander, that is already an Apple Pay partner in the U.K. Now, Apple informs that its payment service will also support cards from Carrefour, Ticket Restaurant and American Express.

Spanish customers will be able to use Apple Pay at some 27 major retail outlets including Bershka, Cepsa, Cortefiel, Media Markt, Repsol and of course Apple’s own brick-and-mortar stores. Support from BP and Fnac are listed as coming soon.

Apple has far-reaching plans and promises customers will soon be able to add customer cards to the iOS Wallet app, allowing easy collection and redemption of loyalty points.

Apple Pay was first launched in US two years ago and since then has expanded to Australia, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland and the U.K. Reportedly, the next country in the list will be Germany. Apple is now focused on the service promotion into major markets of Europe and Asia.

While Apple is expanding its mobile payment service, Samsung has pushed back the UK release of its payment service until next year. Initially, the company was planning to bring the service to Britain in 2016 after the launch in the US and South Korea last year.

“Following successful launches of Samsung Pay around the world, we are planning to launch the service in the UK in 2017,” Samsung confirmed.

The catastrophic release of the Galaxy Note 7 may have impacted the delay. As a reminder, in October Samsung had to recall millions of devices after several had been found to overheat and explode.

Despite the fact that Samsung’s phones run on the Android operating system allowing customers to use Android Pay, the company targets to expand its own payment service as well. It strives to reduce its reliance on Android at the same time as Google exercises more control over the software.

Google that used to rely on partners with Samsung among them released its own Android smartphone for the first time last month. Customers have been looking forward to a Google phone for quite a long. Indeed, as concerns hardware, Google only tinkered around the edges with its Nexus line.

We are all used to the thought that the combination of hardware and software has always been something unique to Apple. So no wonder that Android fell behind in this regard. Now, Google is believed to be able to steal Apple’s crown if phone and operating system work in harmony.

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